Understanding resizing

Profile dimensions

In general case RenderChan uses “WIDTH” and “HEIGHT” options to control the output dimensions. Those options represent the size of the screen. They are defined globally for your project in the “project.conf” file for each profile.

So, when you render your animation file RenderChan takes width and height from your active profile and renders your animation at this resolution.

Overriding WIDTH and HEIGHT per-file

The WIDTH and HEIGHT can also be defined for individual file specifically by using .conf file. For example if you have file at “some/path/file.blend”, then you can create “some/path/file.blend.conf” and define custom WIDTH and HEIGHT inside. In this case the values defined in the project configuration are ignored and the file will be rendered at fixed dimensions, independently from selected profile for your project.

In a file-specific .conf file you can also define dimensions relatively to project-defined values. For example you can write “WIDTH=*2”. This will tell RenderChan to render your file with a WIDTH twice bigger than defined in the profile. This is very useful if you want to render a file for use as scrolled panorama.

Source dimensions

Everything above works good for animation files. But let’s remember that sometimes we have files, representing assets for our animations. Those ones generally have dimensions different than the screen size and should be rendered with respect to those dimensions. Such files could be textures (we may want to convert XCF to PNG for use in Blender) or artwork for animation (a custom-sized KRA file with parts of character should be rendered (converted) into PNG to use in Synfig).

In this case we don’t want to use dimensions, defined in the project profile. Instead we want to keep dimensions of the source file. This is achieved through USE_OWN_DIMENSIONS parameter. If set to ‘1’. then RenderChan will use dimensions of source file.

In most cases you don’t need to explicitly set this option, because some modules (namely, Krita and Gimp) already have it enabled by default. So, all files, parsed by those modules, ignore the project-defined dimensions and use their own.

What you need to know, is that you can override this option for specific cases. For example you can set this option to “0” for specific Krita’s KRA file and as result it will render in dimensions, defined by project profile. Or, in opposite case, you can set this option to “1” for some Synfig file and that will make RenderChan ignore dimensions defined by project profile. Last example is very useful if you made some texture with Synfig and it has non-standard dimensions.

Proxy scale

And here goes the last parameter to explain. In case if USE_OWN_DIMENSIONS parameter is set to “1”, then the dimensions of project profile are ignored. That means that file will be rendered at the same resolution, independently from profile.

But the power of RenderChan profiles is that we can work with lower resolutions for all our files and thus decrease the consumed memory and rendering time. So, there should be a way to set scaling for all files that haveĀ  USE_OWN_DIMENSIONS parameter enabled. This is what PROXY_SCALE parameter for.

The PROXY_SCALE parameter defines scaling factor for the files that have USE_OWN_DIMENSIONS parameter set to ‘1’. In usual case this option should be set in “project.conf” file for each profile.

For example, ‘draft’ profile can have PROXY_SCALE = ‘0.5’ and this makes all asset files rendered twice smaller.

Important: If dimensions, produced by scaling, are not integer values, then no scaling is applied. This is done to avoid distortions for image proportions.

Default value of PROXY_SCALE is 1.0.